Monthly Archives: July 2017

The Colorado growing season is short, but mighty. We make up for the reduced length with the best and sweetest Olathe (pronounced: o-LAY-tha) sweet corn and toothsome, sticky-dripping Western Slope Palisade peaches. (Visit Colorado wine country, too, if you go to pick peaches.) Somewhere in there the Rocky Ford cantaloupes also ripen, the Pueblo green chiles are roasted on street corners–going into myriad pots of pork green chile or into the freezer for scrambled eggs at Christmas and Super Bowl snacks. (We eat a lot of New Mexican Hatch chiles, too, which come in somewhat milder versions.) If you’re really lucky, you even know someone who fly fishes and will bring back trout we smoke to last all winter long. (More on those last three another post.)

By the way, the Olathe Corn growers and the Palisade Peach producers each sponsor local festivals every summer and they’re coming right up:

Cooking with Addie posts will come up periodically and are designed for older kids or teens learning to cook. Not a kid? Make this anyway!!

It wasn’t too awfully hot this morning, so I was willing to turn on the oven to make some muffins I’ve been dreaming about for quite a while. Addie, my young fellow cook and blog-reader, is quite a baker according to her mom and also from the photos I’ve seen. It seemed a good thing for the next “COOKING WITH ADDIE” (a short series of older kids’ cooking posts this summer) to be something scrumptious for the oven. Whether you’re a kid or a kid at heart, I think you might enjoy some seasonal summer muffins this year. (Dessert is still coming up in the last post of the series; don’t despair!)

When it’s cherry season in Colorado, I’m usually baking a pie. That’s because our cherries are sour cherries –or pie cherries– depending upon where you’re from. You have to grow your own sour cherries or beg from a friend wherever you live; they don’t hold up well for shipping, so…

“Man (and woman) cannot live by bread alone,” was always the truth.Even the very best of bread, which is some of the most wondrous and healthy food in the world, must have its topping, its gilding, its raison d’être–its reason to exist. Bread bakers, feel free to chime in disagreeing here.

Add wine, of course. How about other necessities like song and laughter? That would mean a party and the most memorable parts of the current season (the touch of hot summer sun lingering on glistening skin, a crash of sudden wild storms cracking open in the distance, the heady sniff of freshly cut grass, hot orange day lilies along the path, sleazy dog-eared paperbacks sporting just such language) all call out for such a gathering to occur at night and out of doors.